soundwave106 wrote:I also understand that we have some relatives up in the totality path seven years from now (in Vincennes Indiana) so we'll probably be doing another private gathering-of-the-relatives then. It'll probably be a shorter trip, because there's not a whole lot of notable things in Indiana.

I wouldn't drive to Indiana to see an eclipse, and I live there.

Vincennes is, however, the birthplace of Red Skelton. You can't visit there without seeing multiple reminders.

Plink Floyd wrote:I'm telling ya, my pics aren't any better than yours. I think I made a mistake using the 2X conveter, it's a cheapo Tamron. For the next eclipse, I'll leave it off (and hopefully have a better tele).

My environs was similar to yours. We were at a city park just by the river (closer to the water than you were, so before the eclipse started, we had a fresh river breeze). I think it was the Etowah river (there's two in that city, Etowah and something other).

We had ducks and geese all around us. As the eclipse started, they all went to the margins of the river and bundled up to sleep. Once the eclipse was over and the sun started to return, they all started to look around and slowly started to swim just around the margins. If ducks could ever have a "wtf" face they would have had it then, I'm sure...

Here's some frame grabs from my e-movie. The first one's before totality, when I thought a cloud was going to spoil it. It went away. The rest are just lens abberations and weirdness from sliding the filter to different positions in front of the lens. For next time, I have an idea for a better diy filter design.

The last pic is more "experimental"... I wanted to see what the Canon's built in HDR mode would do. It looks... odd and interesting.

I think many of the scenes were shot using the Canon "handheld night mode" (which is sort of also HDRish, just optimized for night photography) but the manual mode ones came out pretty decent too. Can't remember which is which at the moment.

Not really a "solar eclipse" filter (unsafe to use with a viewfinder) but good enough for short live view time. (There is a lot of Internet alarmism about these type of filters, but I think decent quality ND filters are fine until I see some actual data on this that proves me wrong. Internet blog / forum blah blah talk does not count as data.)

Unlike a solar eclipse filter, from what I understand these also have a nice second purpose: long exposure shots during the day. EG: If I want to set the camera on a tripod and photograph a waterfall for a couple of minutes of exposure time in the middle of the day, sure!

I shot a couple shots of the partial eclipse as well, not quite as interesting to me. Maybe if I could frame it with something on the ground it would be cool (the sun was almost straight up in the sky). The filter was super useful though for framing (and focusing, since that had to be done manually).